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Happy birthday, POLITICO

Our publication launched on this day five years ago, and we hope our readers will join us (or at least indulge us) for a moment to mark the occasion. There are more than 200 people who now work in our newsroom and run our business, and all of us are proud of what we have built.

For the two of us, however, and for the small group of people who were present with us at POLITICO’s launch, celebration is mixed with darker sentiments — flashbacks to the most harrowing, and humbling, moments of our professional lives.

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Publisher Robert Allbritton and CEO Frederick Ryan Jr. gave the go-ahead to start a new publication in late November 2006. Launch date was set for seven weeks away, Jan. 23, 2007. In that period, we had to recruit a staff, name the publication, build a website and come up with an editorial menu that would impress a more or less skeptical community of political operatives and fellow journalists.

The pressure was in large measure self-imposed. We had not exactly been shy in announcing our plans and our intention for POLITICO to elbow its way into the top tier of political news organizations. It was hardly surprising that some people might wish that our boasts would end in humiliation.

They damn near got their wish. Just days before launch, we were staring at drafts of stories that weren’t remotely ready for publication, a staff that was still in skeletal condition and a website that, by any normal expectation, was weeks away from being ready. What followed was a succession of all-nighters, anguished speculation about whether we should delay launch (No way, Allbritton and Ryan made clear), all interspersed with very, very vivid visions of the disaster that was about to happen: The plane was headed into the mountain.

As it happened, we cleared the peak with inches to spare. In our first week of publication, we had a clunky site and clunky stories — as well as some flashes of genuinely great reporting and writing that were examples of why we wanted to start a new publication in the first place. Over the next week, and the next month and the next year, we saw our product getting better, and the air of dread hanging over us gradually lifted.

There was an animating idea behind POLITICO, then and now. The idea was that the era of traditional news organizations — the metropolitan dailies, weekly news magazines and broadcast news networks — that produced general-interest content for a mass audience was fading, and that the future more likely belonged to sites that defined a special niche and then dominated that niche with manic intensity. It was not an entirely new idea — ESPN had done it for sports — and Allbritton and Ryan joined us in believing that a similar opportunity existed for coverage of politics and the workings of Washington.

The idea was strong enough to survive any stumbles at our launch and to soon enough build a publication that was succeeding robustly on both editorial and business fronts. This success has emboldened us to extend our reach. In addition to our core POLITICO print and digital platforms, which are free to readers and supported by advertising, we have over the past year launched a series of policy publications under the banner of POLITICO Pro, with highly specialized content for subscribers in the areas of energy, health care and technology. POLITICO and POLITICO Pro, working closely in concert, have a shared mission: to be the best and strongest publication for coverage of politics and government in the nation’s capital.

Just as our editorial mission remains the same as at launch, so, too, does our editorial personality — a mixture of public bravado tempered by a very keen awareness of the fragile nature of success in modern media. We are of the generation that in very compressed time frames has seen some of the most illustrious brands in the news business falter and new organizations rocket to success with amazing speed. Simply put, we have concluded that the news media are never going to settle back into a comfortable status quo — nonstop change and disruption is our lot in life. Just five years ago, Facebook was struggling for equal footing with then-powerful MySpace, and Twitter did not exist. In this environment, complacency is a mortal enemy, and constant innovation and imagination are essential. POLITICO’s work, proud of it as we are, is just beginning.

As we mark this anniversary, some thanks are in order:

• POLITICO’s leaders, Robert Allbritton and Fred Ryan, are the bravest and most creative publishers in the business today — two innovators whose push for new ideas and new reasons to be optimistic about the future of journalism has been a source of constant support.

• POLITICO’s staff in the newsroom and in our business operations is a source of unending awe — filled with professionals whose ideas are better than the competition’s and who never stop pushing themselves to be the best.

• POLITICO’s audience deserves the most thanks of all. This is a publication by people who love politics for people who love politics. The subjects we cover are serious stuff, but we believe — and our audience agrees — that it should be possible to have a lot of fun along the way.

Our commitment to our audience is to keep getting better and to preserve the best traditions of journalism even as POLITICO, like our colleagues at many publications we respect, seeks to reinvent and re-energize these traditions in a chaotic but exciting new age for our profession.

Personally I feel that Politico has been a huge boon for us political and policy wonks. It has managed to outpace all the older media outlets (NY Times, Wash Post, CNN, Fox) and provide a far greater range of both reporting and analysis in a non-partisan manner the others cannot attain. As a high student, Politico helped develop my vague political interest into a more full-fledged understanding of economic, political and foreign matters, inspiring me to study economics and political science in university. I have Politico and its great editors and writers to thank.

Happy birthday???? Politico started out as a fair arbiter of the news and politics, it has now become a part of the left wing progressive MSM. As with most of the left wing MSM the honest profession of journalism has been left lying in a gutter of street slime.

Why do you even bother to come here? You're a whiner. Go to Red State or some other website that will parrot your views, but stop your whining here. You think you are so perfect that you believe the entire country should think like you.

Happy birthday???? Politico started out as a fair arbiter of the news and politics, it has now become a part of the left wing progressive MSM. As with most of the left wing MSM the honest profession of journalism has been left lying in a gutter of street slime.

Why do you even bother to come here? You're a whiner. Go to Red State or some other website that will parrot your views, but stop your whining here. You think you are so perfect that you believe the entire country should think like you.

Why do you even bother to come here? You're a whiner. Go to Red State or some other website that will parrot your views, but stop your whining here. You think you are so perfect that you believe the entire country should think like you.

I've enjoyed blasting Obamaco the last few years for being the brown-nosing, butt-smooching, sycophant Obama Propaganda Ministry tool that it is. Hopefully in one year, you will be celebrating your 6 anniversary lamenting how the massive economic recovery that started after Obama was voted out of office has hurt the chances for Dems in 2016. Congrats - I guess